David J. Getsy in Conversation with William J.

Simmons 39

Appearing
William J. Simmons: Queer art has often been predicated on the literal nature
of LGBTQ themes and bodies, following the idea that representation is a
form of liberation. How does the representation of politics differ from the
politics of representation?

Differently David Getsy: The history of queer practices in art has been wrapped
up with a desire to testify to the existence of those who love and live dif-
ferently. This means that both art and its histories have tended to be

Abstractions
preoccupied with the production of evidence.

This compulsion to make evident has its roots in the late nineteenth-
century construction of sexuality as a means to categorize people based
on their erotic or romantic gravitations. In this history, regulations of

Transgender and
sexual acts gave way to a wider monitoring of individuals ways of living.
The agents both of oppression and of resistance positioned what we
have come to call sexuality as being more than carnal. Rather, it came
to delimit an interrelated set of nonnormative attitudes toward desire,

Queer Capacities
family, and ones relation to the social. One way this played out historically
was in the emergence of medical and legal formulations of homosexual
(and later LGB) identity that could be posited, defined, and identified
whether that be to attack or to defend them. No less than those who would
be prejudiced against them, pro-LGB activists and cultural workers, that
is, tended to pursue a model of identity that privileged shared experience,
coherence, and visibility. It was this model that they came to argue was
David J. Getsy in Conversation equivalent (but still different) to the norm to which they aspired. In this
with William J. Simmons they demanded evidence of existence as a foundation for arguing for
sympathy and compassion. This is the equal rights strategy in which
restrictive identity categories are constructed and, consequently, defend-
ed in order to talk back to the unequal distribution of power. Ultimately,
however, this strategy demands that difference be made visible, count-
able, and open to surveillance as a precondition for arguing that such
identifiable divergence be treated like the norm. Not only does this strat-
egy insidiously reinforce a hierarchical relationship between normalcy
and difference, it also serves to engender attitudes of assimilationism
and of subordination to normativity among those who are fighting preju-
dice. Difference (and oppression) is still experienced, but it is denied as a
foundation for opposition. Michel Foucault was right to warn of all that
was lost when sexuality became a taxonomic category of identity and,
consequently, became an axis of regulation.1

1 Beyond the analysis in Michel Foucault, the 1978 interview published as The Gay
in Pink Labour on Golden Streets: Queer Art Practices, History of Sexuality: Volume 1, an Science, Critical Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011):
eds. Christiane Erharter, Dietmar Schwrzler, Ruby Sircar, Introduction, trans. Robert J. Hurley (1976; 385403; the 1982 interview published as
and Hans Scheirl (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015) New York: Vintage Books, 1990); see also Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,
40 Appearing Differently: Abstractions Transgender and Queer Capacities David J. Getsy in Conversation with William J. Simmons 41

In the 1980s in the United States, a recognizably queer politics (and art)
emerged publically out of the fight against the genocidal effects of govern-
mental inaction to the AIDS crisis, and activists and cultural workers de-
manded visibility and accountability. (Foucault was a key source for many
as they thought about the redistribution of cultural power).2 Such polit-
ical movements targeted assimilationist politics for their compulsory
self-abnegation and argued that their self-erasure from discourse had facil-
itated the ability of the government to passively overlook the mounting
deaths caused by AIDS.

Paradoxically, clear evidence of the existence of nonnormative desires

was (again) demanded. Anti-assimilationismthe refusal to erase the differ-
ence of nonnormative sexual livesbecame a cardinal principle, and it
manifested itself as highly visible incursions of nonnormative sexualities
into politics and culture. In activism and its attendant cultural manifesta-
tions like visual art and theater, evidence of existence was confrontation-
ally produced. The United States is not the only place this happened
during this era, of course, and we can see different kinds of AIDS-related
artist activism in Europe and in Latin America (as with, for example,
Roberto Jacoby in Argentina or Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis in Chile). Im
calling forth this history here because its important to remember how
queer practices were formulated boldly and bravely in public discourse
for the first time on a large scale. Across this history, however, it has
been evidence of visibility and the ability to identify that have been given
the most currency. That is, from the invention of the modern category
of sexuality to the eruption of antiassimilationist queer practices that de-
parted from it, an organizing question has been how to bring into repre-
sentation visible positions of difference.

WS: So, are there alternatives to the politics of representational visibility?

DG: Running within and against this history has been the ongoing desire
to evade the protocols of identification and surveillance that come with
the figuration of queer positions. This arises from a skepticism about the
limitations of overarching taxonomies of identity and, more specifically,
about the ways in which sexuality has been made available to representa-
tionthat is, about how visualizations of sexuality have tended to focus

in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault
195484, Vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity, and
Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The
New Press, 1998), 16373; and the 1983
Fig. 3 interview published as Sexual Choice,
Gordon Hall, Sexual Act: Foucault and Homosexuality,
SET (V), 2014 Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews
and Other Writings of Michel Foucault,
19771984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (New
York: Routledge, 1988), 286303.
2 See David Halperin, Saint Foucault
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
42 Appearing Differently: Abstractions Transgender and Queer Capacities David J. Getsy in Conversation with William J. Simmons 43

almost exclusively on bodies and their couplings as recognizable signs

of queer sensibilities. Such a privileging of images of erotic objects has
the effect of caricaturing sexuality as sexual activity (even as something
to be defended and celebrated) while replaying the regulatory compulsion
to produce evidence of existenceto appear as lesbian, gay, bisexual,
homosexual, or queer. That is, even though the history of modern sexuality
has been caught up with arguing for a category of identity, the allowable
and verifiable representations of nonheterosexual sexual identities have
tended to privilege bodies and acts. In turn, this has prompted some
artists to pursue ways to resist the reproduction of the regulatory power
that makes the queer subject identifiable and distinguishable.

What Im trying to say is that while the history of LGB activism and art
have tended to focus on the politics of representation and visibility, there
has also been, from the start, a recognition of how easy legibility comes
with a cost. After all, how does one make sexuality visible to others? More
to the point, how does one make it visible in a sophisticated way that
speaks to the complexities of desire, of self-created familial bonds, and
of the accumulated experience of living outside tacit norms? Queer
experience can incorporate attitudes toward the world, family, sociality,
and futurityattitudes of resistance to compulsory heterosexuality that
depart from its normative and procreative logics. How, today, do artists
address this richer understanding of what sexual perspectives of differ-
ence can produce? Think about the problems faced, for example, by an
artist who identifies as lesbian or gay or queer and asserts the centrality
of that part of their existence to their work but who refuses to paint,
sculpt, or write about erotic objects, same-sex couplings, or naked bodies
or, we shouldnt forget, who might be barred from doing so. How do
they prove to skeptical viewers or readers that their sexual sensibility
matters? Possibilities for speaking from experiences of difference are
limited when one can only testify to existence through a recourse to the
depiction of sexual acts, same-sex couplings, or erotically available bodies.
This becomes a political as well as a formal question.

These concerns are not new, and they can be discerned throughout the
history of art and, especially, twentieth-century art.3 But what Ive been
fascinated to see is that many twenty-first-century artists have been
finding one answer to these questionsand by no means the only one
in abstraction. This is, for them, not a turning away from politics but rather
a mode in which to enact politics. Abstraction has been embraced for
its oppositional, utopian, and critical possibilities, for it is in abstraction
that the dynamic potential of queer stances can be manifested without
Fig. 4
Jonah Groeneboer, recourse to the representation of bodies. The human figure in representa-
bent hip, 2014 tion is inescapably culturally marked. Abstraction is one tactic for
44 Appearing Differently: Abstractions Transgender and Queer Capacities David J. Getsy in Conversation with William J. Simmons 45

refusing the power of this marking and for resisting the visual taxonomies
through which people are recognized and regulated.

WS: So, what is the relationship between this history of the representation of
sexuality and renewed interest in the term queer?

DG: In my view, abstraction makes sense as a vehicle for queer stances

and politics because it is unforeclosed in its visualizations and open in the Tex
ways in which it posits relations. On a conceptual level, queer is an adjec-
tive and not a noun. The usage of the term always implies at least two other
thingsa noun to which it is applied (a queer what?) and a norm or con-
vention against which the term queer is posed. So, the term is always his-
torically and contextually contingent. It infects and overtakes the nouns
and things to which it is attached. One way of saying this is to say that it is
performative in the strict sense, and its effects are to highlight and bracket
the operations of implicit normativity. The connotations of queer in Eng-
lish center on a suspicion about unnaturalness, and it is the assumptions
about what is and is not natural that queer practices critique.

Im setting all this up to remind us that queer is no one thingnor is it

easily recognized. It is an operation in which norms are called into question,
Fig. 5
common sense is challenged, unnaturalness is upheld, and castigation Prem Sahib, You & Me Both II, 2013
is rebuffed through its embrace. It is frustrating for some to deal with the
fact that queer has no one simple definition nor a readily available ico-
nography, but its important to keep it mobile, tactical, and immoderate. establishments and by otherwise well-meaning gay and lesbian activists
This is why it continues to be urgent todayand why its mobility cannot as merely a manifestation of nonnormative sexual desire and identity.
be limited to the politics of representation. For this reason, abstraction has Such appropriations effectively made the contributions of trans and gender-
proved to be a useful mode for many artists in thinking through queer variant people invisible. Even more problematically, transfolk were also
perspectives and their tactical richness. subject to prejudice not just from the general public but also from gay
and lesbian politics and culture. They were seen to be distracting from
WS: I noticed that in all you just said, you didnt include transgender. You the message and problematic to gay and lesbian assimilationism.
even left the T of the acronym. But much of your recent work has fore-
grounded the perspective of transgender studies. How have the important 3 See also Queer Formalisms: Jennifer Namaste, The Use and Abuse of Queer
challenges brought about by recent interventions from transgender theory Doyle and David Getsy in Conversation, Tropes: Metaphor and Catachresis in
complicated our understanding of the word queer? Art Journal 72, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 5871. Queer Theory and Politics, Social
4 See, for instance, the critiques in Susan Semiotics 9, no. 2 (1999): 21334; and
Stryker, Transgender Studies: Queer Viviane K. Namaste, Invisible Lives: The
DG: This is crucial for both historical and conceptual reasons. While they Theorys Evil Twin, GLQ 10, no. 2 (2004): Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered
are interwoven, transgender and queer histories should not be simply 21215; Transgender History (Berkeley: People (Chicago: University of Chicago
Seal Press, 2007); and see notes 6 and 7 Press, 2000).
equated. Historically, gay and lesbian politics (as well as its outgrowth in
below; Viviane K. Namaste, Tragic 5 See the discussion in David Valentine,
academia as queer theory and queer studies) have tended to subsume, Misreadings: Queer Theorys Erasure of The Categories Themselves, GLQ 10,
ignore, or misrepresent the role of gender nonconforming people.4 More Transgender Subjectivity, in Queer no.2 (2003): 21520; and David Valentine,
broadly, the distinctions between what we in the twentieth and twenty- Studies; A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography
Transgender Anthology, ed. Brett Beemyn of a Category (Durham, NC: Duke
first centuries define as gender and sexuality are historically contingent and Mickey Eliason (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
and not clear cut.5 Gender variance was often seenby both medical University Press, 1996), 183203; Viviane K.
46 Appearing Differently: Abstractions Transgender and Queer Capacities David J. Getsy in Conversation with William J. Simmons 47

Susan Stryker has talked about how the uncontextualized addition of the
T to LGBT in mainstream activism had the pernicious effect of normalizing
gender for the L, the G, and the B in that acronym, thus desexualizing
the T and keeping all visibly nonconforming genders into that last letter.6
This doesnt mean that there should not be coalitional politics among
queer and transfolk, and Stryker has also argued how much queer politics
and LGB rights movements have always been tied up with gender non-
conformity and the fight against gender oppression.7 The relation of queer
to transgender should always be interrogated for the many ways in
which they differ and interweave. I slipped the T out of the above because
I was specifically talking about queer history. The politics of representa-
tion and the problems of visibility are different in trans historyas are the
demands that one appear in order to be a political subject.
All in all, its important to remember that there are allegiances and over-
laps between queer and transgender priorities and experience, but they
are not equivalent. Many individuals adopt both terms as ways in which
they affiliate and understand themselves, but one needs to be careful not
to equate gender nonconformity with sexual nonconformity. Further,
one must understand how queer practices are always also fundamentally
about gender. Because of this, the critique of gender regulation must be
prioritized and the history of appropriation of trans experience by queer
politics and theory must be attended to and revised.
WS: In another piece, you argued: While transgender subjects and experience
must remain central and defining, the lessons of transgender critique de-
mand to be applied expansively.8 How can transgender theory be best incor-
porated into art historical scholarship?
DG: Transgender studies, as an intellectual formation and as an academic
manifestation of real world politics, demands a substantial reconfigura-
tion of our conceptions of personhood, relationality, and the social. Quite
simply, the world looks different once we attend to the historical reality
that gender is multiple, bodies are mutable, personhood is successive, and
variability rather than (binary or dimorphic) consistency is ubiquitous.
Our accounts of the human, of sexuality, and of the interpersonal must
all be rethought through a valuation of mutability and of particularity.
For instance, recognition of genders pluralities fundamentally undermines
6 Susan Stryker, Transgender History, Homo-
the ways in which mainstream definitions of sexuality are predicated on
binaries, however aligned or shuffled. What is needed is a broad recasting
7 Susan Stryker, Why the T in LGBT Is
of politics, biopolitics, and necropolitics to understand the ways in
which persons have been taxonomically regulated through the assump-
tion of dimorphism and through the repeated positing of gender as static
and unworkable.
With regard to artistic practice and its histories, I think art history can offer
a major resource in this endeavor in its long-standing critique of repre-
sentational strategies and of the use of the human figure as privileged
image and allegorical device. In other words, art history has been con-
cerned, for a long time, with the adequate rendering of the human form
and the debates that have surrounded it. These arbitrations are ethical
and not just aesthetic.
To take on the indisputable reality of transgender history and its com-
plexity demands that additional work be done. Beyond its foundational
focus on trans subjects speaking to and from trans experience and his-
tory, transgender studies is also a position from which to launch expan-
sive critiques of gender regulation, of binarisms and dimorphisms, and
of the ways in which persons are recognized. For me, this meant that I
had to look differently at the ways in which arts histories have tended to
reinforce models of the human that disallowed particularity and transfor-
mation. So I track episodes in which gender mutability or plurality incited
reactions of anxiety and repression, or I examine ways in which artistic
practices formulated non-dimorphic or nonbinary accounts of genders
and bodies. In my new book Abstract Bodies, it is sculptures struggle
with extreme abstraction or objecthood in the 1960s that proved to be
a particularly rich site for asking questions demanded by transgender
studies.9 It allowed me to see differently the work of non-trans artists
such as David Smith or Dan Flavin. They are artists who would never
themselves espouse a critical attitude toward a binary model of gen-
derlet alone a more open understanding of genders complexity. So,
I use the questions from transgender studies to re-view their work itself,
showing how the artists desires to refuse the human figure inadvertent-
ly produced unforeclosed possibilities for thinking differently about how
the human could be nominated. This is what I mean when I talk about
transgender capacity, and I think its essential for scholars and artists
to take on board the wider critique of gender and biopolitics on which
transgender studies insists. Such work supplements the important re-
search being done by trans scholars on history, theory, and politics as
well as contributes to a wider revision of the ways in which we analyze
the human as a category of analysis and politics. My historical re-
8 David Getsy, Capacity, TSQ: Transgender
normativity, and Disciplinarity, Radical Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1 (2014): 48.
History Review 100 (Winter 2008): 14557. 9 David Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties
Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender
Here to Stay, Salon, October 11, 2007. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
http://www.salon.com/2007/10/11/
transgender_2/.
48 Appearing Differently: Abstractions Transgender and Queer Capacities
search on 1960s abstraction seeks to understand how nonrepresenta-
tional art objects problematized binary gender assignments, how ac-
counts of gender were reformulated in this decade, and, more broadly,
how this history can inform current engagements with abstraction by
trans and queer artists.
WS: Following this line and thinking about this new book on nonrepresenta-
tional sculpture, how do these critiques relate to abstraction as a practice
that gives voice to nonnormative sexualities or atypical or transformable
genders?
DG: Abstraction has afforded many artists a way of thinking about the
varieties of identification that operate for individuals. With regard to
gender, abstractions avoidance of the figure offers the possibility to at
least partially circumvent the tendency to read bodies as if they signify
simply the gender of the person with that body. In other words, one
shouldnt assume that one can discern gender from a quick glance at a
person or a body. Figural representation brings with it the cultural mark-
ing of bodies in relation to ideologies and power, so one means of resis-
tance is to refuse to render the human form and to demand an open
range of potential identifications.
Abstraction is not a panacea for the cultural oppression of otherwise
genders and sexualities, but it is a generative and increasingly attractive
mode in which to prompt new visualizations. Because it refuses repre-
sentation and figuration, abstraction relies on relations, be they between
internal forms or externally with the viewer or with the space. One can
examine those relations for what they propose and how they foster vari-
ability and particularity.
WS: Can the lessons we derive from the queer and transgender advance-
ments be applied to different veins of artistic practice beyond abstraction?
DG: There is no denying that abstraction is a rarefied mode, but it is nev-
ertheless a capacious one that engenders openness and potential. Its
not, however, the only way to think about temporalized personhoods
and plural genders. Any rendering of the human form (and any evocation
of it as a standard) necessarily engages with the arbitration of persons
and bodies, and transgender studies argues that we misrecognize the
world by assuming that bodies and genders are simply and easily divided
into two static camps. Instead, it demands that we attend to the tempo-
ral nature of bodies and persons and that we not assume that gender is
readable as an expression of bodily configurations. Similarly, queer stud-
ies problematizes how we think about how bodies relate to one another,
David J. Getsy in Conversation with William J. Simmons 49
how desire operates, and how the social is formulated. These questions
are both bracing and enabling for the study of image making, and they
offer ways to show how artistic practice is an arena in which accounts of
personhood have, for centuries, been at issue. Abstraction distills these
concerns and provides an exemplary theoretical object for them, but the
questions are mobile and infectious.
WS: Is there, then, a transgender iconography? A queer iconography? Surely
this runs the risk of some kind of essentialism, though it sounds as promising
as it does problematic. These issues have been on the mind of straight art-
ists for some time as well. Lisa Phillips said of David Salle in 1986: Salle has
largely displaced the eroticism of his subject matter into the act of painting
itself, demanding an erotics of art as a way of encountering the world.10
DG: Well, the big difference is that Salles subject position is in line with
compulsory heterosexuality and normative accounts of gender as binary,
so there is not the same political weight given to (or expected of) his
appearing as heterosexual or male. Displacement or eroticism can be
apolitical for an artist like Salle in a way it isnt for an artist working from
a trans or queer perspective. For trans and queer artists, to choose to
be visible is a political act. But from those same positions, to argue that
ones difference still matters while refusing to become an object of sur-
veillance or voyeurism is no less political. This is the difficulty. How does
one do justice to the complexity and daily political content of trans or
queer existence without simply requiring self-disclosure and self-
representation as avatar of an identity category?
Back to your first question. Yes, there are iconographic signs that have
been used by queer and trans artistseverything from Oscar Wildes
green carnation to the omnipresent rainbow to the proud display of the
chest scar. These are reductive and by no means universally accepted.
But I think the bigger question is how to refuse the requirement of an
iconography. Thats where we started this conversation, after all. It is of-
ten assumed that in order to be recognized as such, queer work has to
figure queerness in the form of the iconography of sex and desire and
that trans work has to make visible a process of transition. Such icono-
graphic presumptions fall prey to the same evidentiary protocols that
characterize the politics of visibility. We have to leave room to be able to
speak from experiences that deny being so figured, and we have to re-
ject the presumption that one needs to self-disclose and make oneself
easily recognizable in order to have ones differences matter.
10 Lisa Phillips, His Equivocal Touch in the J.Kardon, ed. (Philadelphia: Institute of
Vicinity of History, in David Salle, Contemporary Art, 1986), 31.
50 Appearing Differently: Abstractions Transgender and Queer Capacities David J. Getsy in Conversation with William J. Simmons 51

Its precisely because of its own refusals of representation that abstrac-

tion seems newly political to many artists. Abstraction has become a
position from which to prompt new visualizations and to propose new
relations. Again, it resists the cultural marking of the body by refusing
the figure. Some might see this as utopian and apolitical, but there are
many artists who put forth abstraction as a way to make space for a
critique of relationality and for worlding differently. Again, its not the
only strategy, but it is one that has been increasingly important in recent
years as a means to think beyond the limitations of an exclusive focus
on the politics of representation.

WS: So, what about other practices? My own work has thus far focused on the
Pictures Generation, especially the late Jimmy DeSana, whose lush, abstracted
bodies of the early 1980s became complex photomontages after he was diag-
nosed with AIDS. How might photography factor into these discussions?

DG: Because photography often starts with image capture, it differs from
the ways in which images in painting and sculpture are largely built up
through their material mediums. Its a clichbut not all that wrongto
say that photography has a more intimate relationship with the world. It
captures it, receptively, and relies on it. Montage and digital tools, how-
ever, afford many possibilities for the captured image(s) to be manipulat-
ed, allowing for new combinatory forms and previously unvisualized po-
tentials. Because of this, degrees of abstraction are surely possible in
photography (in addition to DeSana, one obvious example is Wolfgang
Tillmans), but its still relatively rare. I guess my question for abstract
photography would be medium specific: What were the events during
which the form of the photograph occurred?

For DeSana, however, could you say a bit more? Are those works actually
abstract? I think collage and montage have some specific meanings (and
are related to a long history of visualizing hybridity and the ways in
which the given or the found can be used as raw material for transforma-
tion and recombination).

WS: It is precisely this oscillation between raw material (or the body) and the
capacity for its manipulation that allows DeSana to enter this discussion. Before
being diagnosed with AIDS, DeSana used his camera to dissolve bodies, to
create a world wherein corporeality is both present and diffuseda combina-
tion of queer politics and the mediumsomething that could equally be said
of the work of Amy Sillman or Nicole Eisenman as well. His works of the early
Fig. 6 1980s are indeed representational, but through complex staging, lighting,
Heather Cassils,
The Resilience and precise darkroom production, they speak to the possibility of a photog-
of the 20%, 2013 raphy that is able to approximate the abstract possibilities of raw canvas or
sculptural material.
52 Appearing Differently: Abstractions Transgender and Queer Capacities David J. Getsy in Conversation with William J. Simmons 53

His collage work, done in the darkroom, often uses materials we can recog-
nize, like mustard, ravioli, flour, and letters of the alphabet. In many cases,
DeSana would layer these materials atop photographs using glass, a method
also used by his friend Marilyn Minter. This distancing effect refuses easy as-
similation or consumption, causing us to pause and consider the layers of
representation inherent in the photographthe essence, perhaps, of ab-
straction. In this way, DeSana peels back the laminated image, to use
Barthess terminology, and the crevices in between these sediments take on
their own life. This suggests possibilities for new forms of queer erotics.

Getting back to the present moment, what artists do you see as working
within the queer and trans frameworks that we have been discussing?

DG: My historical work on the 1960s has really been developed in dia-
logue with current practices. This comes, in part, from the fact that I
teach in an art school and am deeply engaged with thinking about how
arts histories inform contemporary art and its making. It was seeing
more and more trans and queer artists working with abstraction in the
studios and in the galleries that made me realize the need for a historical
assessment of a moment when abstraction became a place from which
new accounts of gender could be articulated. This is what drove the
writing of Abstract Bodies. That said, I am beginning to write much more
often about artists working today, since I think all of the questions weve
been discussing about abstraction have become increasingly
widespread.
Ive been approaching this in some writings about artists like Heather
Cassils, who works between performance, sculpture, installation, and
sound. Cassilss performances often have a sculptural element as well as
being aimed at the political history of figuration in art, and I am interested
in the ways in which they critique that history and deploy abstraction.
There are also a number of artists who have used more or less reductive
and geometric abstraction to address trans experience and queer per-
spectives. Im thinking here of artists like Gordon Hall, Jonah Groeneboer,
and Math Bass. Hall, like Cassils, also activates abstract objects through
performance, and they create site-responsive sculptures that speak to
issues of transformation, remaking, care of the self, and the refusal of vi-
sual taxonomies of personhood. For instance, their Set sculptures ap-
pear simple at first. However, the sculptures reveal themselves slowly as
intricately worked objects that repay attention to particularities. Only by
committing to spend time with one of these objects will one begin to
see the ways in which it occupies the space and the ways in which it is
Fig. 7
Jimmy DeSana, Instant Camera, 1980
unique. All of the Set sculptures also produce color effects (through re-
flection) on the wall that they are placed in intimate relation to. However
striking this reflected color, the viewer sees only the effects of the vi-
brancy of the side that it refuses to show us directlythat is, visibly un-
available to us. The visual disclosures made by the sculptures in re-
sponse to the viewers commitment to get to know them are, in this way,
nevertheless restrained and intentionally partial. Not all is available to
looking. Similarly, Groeneboers practice uses both sculpture and paint-
ing to create works that frustrate visual discernment. He makes art that
is deliberately hard to see, singly. For instance, his sculptures made from
barely visible strings in tension are visually inextricable from the space
in which we encounter them. They activate an engaged process of look-
ing in which viewers struggle to see the drawing made by the slight, taut
strings in three dimensions. As they attempt to engage with these barely
visible lines in space, they become just as much aware of what they have
had to choose to not see in order to focus on one aspect of the complex
polygons and quadrilateral outlines hovering in their proximity. I also
think of Basss sculptures that appear, only from some angles, as if they
are bodies underneath brightly striped tarps but from other angles ap-
pear illegible as such.
54 Appearing Differently: Abstractions Transgender and Queer Capacities David J. Getsy in Conversation with William J. Simmons 55

Literature

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Doyle, Jennifer and Getsy, David. Queer People. Chicago: University of Chicago
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offer a representation of the body. Such work can be understood as 72, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 5871.
standing in opposition to the long history of the voyeurism and exploita- Phillips, Lisa. His Equivocal Touch in the
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality: Vicinity of History. In David Salle, edited
tion to which trans and queer people have been subjected. At the same Volume 1, an Introduction. Translated by by Janet Kardon, 2231. Philadelphia:
time, its much more than that, and the work uses abstraction to address Robert J. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, Institute of Contemporary Art, 1986.
larger questions of the politics and poetics of how we view each other, 1990.
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